Thus, on Jan. 22, Mount Calvary Church in Baltimore will enter the U.S. ordinariate — the first Episcopal congregation that voted to take that step. The Rev. Jason Catania, its priest, expects to complete his own journey this summer.
At that point, he will do something that once seemed unthinkable.
Catania will kneel at his parish altar, as a Catholic priest, and recite one of Anglicanism’s most famous texts — the “Prayer of Humble Access” from the 1662 edition of “The Book of Common Prayer.”
Readers of T19 will spot the irony in this article immediately– that few Episocpal parishes use the Prayer of Humble Access anymore. The mindset behind this change is the ultimate cause of the disintegration of the Episcopal Church. The ordination of women and of practicing homosexuals are merely symptoms of this cause, not causes in themselves.
I agree, the Prayer of Humble Access is wonderful, but it’s the Collect for Purity that makes me cry. 🙂
I am woefully ignorant about liturgical history. Can any of you out there tell me if the prayer of humble access comes from the Sarum Rite or any other pre-Reformation liturgy? If so its use in the RC Mass would simply bring us full circle to what was Catholic practice anyway, albeit in Latin.
Terry,
Massey Shepherd writes in his American Prayer Book Commentary that it “is an original composition of Cranmer’s, though phrases were suggested to him by familiar medieval Collects and some passages in the Greek Liturgy of St. Basil.”
Marion Hatchett is more specific: “The form . . . incorporated phrases or concepts form the Liturgy of Saint Basil, Mark 7:28, a Gregorian collect (nos. 851 and 1327) which had been printed at the end of the 1544 litany, John 6:56, and the writings of Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Part 3, Question 74, Article 1).
An English translation of the Mass according to the Sarum Rite :
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/English.htm
There is nothing like the Prayer of Humble Access.